- Polygon experienced about an hour-long outage due to a technical incident involving a validator exit.
- The network’s Heimdall service became unresponsive, stopping blockchain progression temporarily.
- Polygon Foundation said the event was rare and resulted from the network not being programmed for such a validator exit.
- Previous outages have also affected Polygon and other blockchains, sometimes causing financial losses for users.
- After the disruption, Polygon’s POL token dropped 2.5%.
Polygon, a major blockchain network, went offline for about one hour on Wednesday after a validator—a network participant helping to secure the blockchain—left unexpectedly. The outage was caused by a bug in the validation process, which halted the progression of the chain.
The issue began when the Heimdall service, responsible for managing validators and syncing with Ethereum, stopped responding. According to the Polygon Foundation in an X post, the validator’s exit was not something the system was set up to handle, which led to the stoppage.
A spokesperson told DL News the exit was a rare event and not anticipated in the protocol’s programming. The spokesperson clarified, “At no point did the chain lose liveliness, i.e. the ability to execute transactions, although explorers being down may have given people this incorrect view.” Other blockchain networks such as Ethereum typically process validator exits smoothly.
Outages like this hit user confidence, especially since Polygon holds more than $1.4 billion in user funds, with users expecting immediate access to their assets. Past incidents on other blockchains, including Solana and exchanges like Hyperliquid, have led to financial damages when users could not close or adjust trading positions during downtime. Hyperliquid announced a plan to refund users after a 37-minute outage delayed multiple trades this week.
Polygon was launched in 2017 as an answer to Ethereum’s high transaction fees. It has experienced outages before, including an 11-hour downtime in 2022 related to a failed upgrade, and a 10-hour issue with its zkEVM chain in March 2024 due to a sequencer problem, as reported by Cointelegraph and Unchained.
Following this recent outage, Polygon’s POL token experienced a 2.5% decrease in value.
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